Oracle WebCenter is the user engagement platform for social business—connecting people and information.

The Business Value of Self-Service Portals

For a long time, self-service portals were seen as a cost-cutting tool, but a new generation of technologies is turning them into key productivity tools—and even revenue generators. This week, we want to focus on self-service portals, and the business value your organization can realize with the. Here are some frequently asked questions about the growing business value of self-service portals.

What is the definition of a self-service portal? A self-service portal is a Website that enables users—whether they are customers, employees, suppliers, or partners—to perform high-value transactions, from simple account updates to paying bills, managing support tickets, and more.

What is the value proposition of a customer self- service portal?

Besides the value of driving down service costs, self-service portals are a progressively vital element of the customer experience. Customers increasingly prefer to complete transactions themselves via the internet—whenever and wherever they want—rather than having to make a call or travel in person to a business location. And since customer experiences are crucial to achieving competitive advantage, so are self-service customer portals.

In addition, next-generation technologies are also enabling the delivery of highly personalized content, such as compelling cross-sell/up-sell offers based on customers’ profile, activity, purchase history, etc. As a result, self-service portals are evolving from cost-cutting measures to true profit centers.

Do you have a favorite example of a customer self-service portal?We have so many great examples of our customers that are using Oracle WebCenter Portal for self-service portals for their customers. Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is a great story about true customer self-service. LADWP is the largest public utility company in the United States with over 1.6 million customers and provides water and power for millions of residential and commercial customers in Southern California. LADWP was looking for an enterprise class portal to surface mission critical applications to increase customer self-service Web transactions. In order to do so, LADWP turned to Oracle WebCenter Portal, and LADWP customers now have a customer self-service portal which includes: account information such as bills, payments and rebate processing, application and content management integration, and multi-channel access, including mobile devices. You can hear from LADWP CIO Matt Lampe in this video, or catch him on this webcast "City of Los Angeles Improves Customer Satisfaction with Self-Service Portal" at 10:00am PST on Thursday!

What about the value proposition of building employee self-service portals?

An effective self-service portal helps keep employees engaged and happy by putting key information and business processes at their fingertips—from managing their own benefits to completing mission-critical tasks.

To achieve this, a portal needs to raise to the surface back-office applications along with relevant content in an extremely simplified user experience—plus enable employees to easily add applications to create composite applications. Done right, composite applications combine functionality from multiple applications into a single, integrated, intuitive business dashboard.

What are the latest trends and technologies that are driving the next generation of self-service portals? Increasingly, users want to access self-service portals via mobile devices. That makes it vital to be able to reuse existing site builds as much as possible across all platforms. Also, more and more, people want Websites to know who they are and present only content and transactions that are relevant to them, so personalization is essential.

It’s also important to empower business users. Traditionally, portals have required IT intervention. Now, a new generation of technologies is enabling business users to implement changes themselves, speeding business transformation while driving down IT costs.

Finally, social computing, including wikis and other user-generated content, is transforming self-service sites and enabling people to complete more sophisticated transactions more quickly and efficiently through effective collaboration.

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Oracle WebCenter is the center of engagement for business—powering
exceptional experiences for customers, partners, and employees. It connects
people, process, and information with the most complete portfolio of portal,
Web experience management, content, imaging and collaboration technologies.